We've all seen Worth gowns, right? Charles Frederick Worth and the House of Worth dresses are the darlings of fashion history and historical costuming, and Worth is often called the father of haute couture. I'm not sure that's a good thing! Unfortunately, gender bias and sexism in fashion is a part of dress history too, and Victorian fashion was not free from what we now know as the glass escalator.
So, who was Charles Frederick Worth? Worth was a Victorian fashion designer who was able to rapidly build a successful couture dressmaking business in Paris. His clients included Empress Eugenie, the Princess Metternich, and Empress Elisabeth of Austria. He's credited with everything from inventing fashion modeling, normalizing the idea of a designer label, creating seasonal design collections for clients to choose from, and changing the relationship between a designer or dressmaker and their client. He's something of an idol in the dress history field, with historical costumers often choosing his designs for fashion analysis or to recreate, and fashion museums prominently exhibiting his pieces. However, I think gender bias in fashion did and still does paly a huge role in his popularity, and the 'glass escalator' explains why.
We've heard of the glass ceiling, yes? The 'glass escalator' is a related phenomenon where men in women dominated fields receive greater credit, opportunities, and promotions than their female colleagues. Sexism and gender bias teach that men are more suited to managerial roles and cause the contributions of women to be devalued because of gender, both today and in Victorian times. It's not just in fashion, either : the glass escalator is a studied and documented sociology issue in medicine, nonprofits, education, and other fields too. Even though fewer men work in fields like fashion or dressmaking, those that do tend to be promoted further. When we understand the glass escalator, it becomes obvious that this was a major reason for Worth's success, and the comparative obscurity of the women fashion designers who were his colleagues, contemporaries, and competitors in historical couture.
Men in fashion isn't inherently a problem, but Worth's reputation sort of is! Charles Frederick Worth gets credit for everything from inventing the cage crinoline to inventing fashion modeling. The first is documentably false-- someone else patented the cage crinoline in 1856-- and while Worth may have had the idea to advertize clothes with live models, it was his wife, Marie Vernet, that actually did the modeling work. Worth gets credit for developing the seasonal collections and fashion shows that formed a new business model for haute couture in fashion, but it appears he wasn't the only Victorian dressmaker to do this, just used "aggressive self-promotion". He does appear to have normalized the use of designer labels for his business's dresses-- previously, there was no expectation that the name of a designer should be recognizable. Understanding the glass escalator and how Worth's "boldness" was rewarded when a woman's would not have been acceptable changes the
Perhaps Worth's biggest personal achievement is the one I find most frustrating, is how he changed the relationship between a Victorian dressmaker and their client. Worth took on a more directorial role, telling his clients what he thought they should wear and giving himself more authority in one of the few fields where women had held both personal and professional power. What's more, his reputation has outlasted his lifetime, his heirs, and his design house! Worth is talked about so much that it drowns out the names of most other designers of the time. Elizabeth Keckley has a far more significant personal story, Madame Palmyre had an important client taken by Worth, and Maison Paquin had premises right next door to him but is largely forgotten. We can all do better than being part of the glass escalator, whether it's in historical costuming or elsewhere.
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